On Friday, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., a leading provider of lab equipment, said it will start selling products in Canada that can be used to test cannabis.Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press files

For governments, cannabis legalization has happened so fast, it is like "building the plane while we're flying it," conference at UBC hears.

The public can’t let governments rest once recreational cannabis is legalized, according to an academic expert who has been advising the province on the process.

Legalization is happening on such a short schedule that people can’t assume that governments will have things right at the outset, said Gerald Thomas, a University of Victoria scientist who specializes in substance use.

“What I would invite you to invite government to do is set up a really systematic process to go back and look at this,” Thomas told the opening day of a three-day conference on cannabis.

Once legislation is in place and parties find their place in the regulatory structure, “it becomes very, very hard to shift,” sad Thomas said, who has been a consultant for B.C.’s Ministry of Health.

“We’re building the plane as we fly it,” Thomas said. “We’re trying to apply things from alcohol and other areas (such as tobacco), and cannabis doesn’t fit that approach in many, many cases.”

The event is the fourth annual Cannabis Hemp Conference and Expo being held at the University of B.C.’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, which runs through Sunday.

The general thrust of the panel discussion that Thomas appeared on was that while legalization is upon Canada, it will remain a work in progress to deal with unanswered questions about how to incorporate medical users in the recreational system and legalize so-called grey-market product manufacturers.

“I haven’t heard any premier say ‘thank you for letting us not spend so much money on policing and not criminalizing our citizens,” said Larsen, a dispensary owner and director of the group Sensible B.C.

Instead, Larsen said provincial governments have sought more money to carry out the enforcement of new regulations under legalization, “which is just an Alice-in-Wonderland level of upside downness.”

Larsen looks at the era of legalization opening Oct. 17 as the beginning of a “long journey.” It’s one of the reasons he expects “civil disobedience” to continue, and why he has no plans to license the unauthorized dispensaries that he owns.

The conference, sponsored by large-scale licensed producers Agrima and Aurora Cannabis, is intended as an educational forum on cannabis, according to Salimeh Tabrizi, the event’s founder and organizer.

“The conference has always been patient focused, plant focused ” said Tabrizi, who came to cannabis from a background in clinical counselling.

Its sessions includes panel discussions on quality production, medical uses, the spiritual use of cannabis and advancing research into its use.

Tabrizi said the legalization of recreational weed has created an opportunity to take some of the tremendous amount of money being generated by legal, licensed producers and put it into social and sustainability causes related to cannabis use and production.

However, recreational legalization will also come with problems, such as cutting off access to cannabis extracts, edibles and other derivatives being sold by existing dispensaries, but which will be off limits for at least a year under legalization.

“Hopefully, what we have in legalization is a cultural shift that allows for normalization, allows for better conversations,” said lawyer Kirk Tousaw, speaking on the legalization panel.

Tousaw said legalization of recreational cannabis eliminates the “retail point of contact” for medicinal users because workers at the stores that replace dispensaries won’t be allowed to talk about medical uses of the plant.

Tousaw said the new legal framework needs to find ways to absorb what the existing, illegal industry has accomplished in delivering high-quality products “to people that really benefit from them.”

“Let’s learn from that and let’s find a way to incorporate that in a way that they’re no longer criminals for engaging in it,” Tousaw said.

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